All applicants for naturalization, please raise your right hands and repeat ...
These are a few of the United States’ 20 million naturalized citizens.
They make up about half of the nation’s immigrant population.
And the Trump administration’s laser focus on curbing immigration of all kinds
has put these Americans in the spotlight.
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency is currently staffing up a new office
aimed at stripping naturalization from people who they say have cheated the process.
In short: It’s a denaturalization task force.
While the denaturalizations ramped up under the Obama administration, I don't think the average immigrant felt
any kind of fear because most people believe they weren't going to be a target of a denaturalization
application. There are also some changes coming to immigration law that will alter decades of practice.
It’s much more enforcement- oriented.
The denaturalization statute should not be used as a political tool to keep everyone
who becomes naturalized basically on their knees with their mouth shut
and as long as they obey and go along, then they'll be OK.
The country’s immigrants could face unexpected consequences,
including one high-profile naturalized citizen you wouldn’t have guessed.
Hey fam, I’m Imaeyen. And you should subscribe to this channel right now, because this Sunday
we’re taking a close look at how not all citizenships are created equal,
and the one thing you should know if you’re facing denaturalization.
Don’t come to our country illegally. Come
like other people do. Come legally.
Anti-immigration rhetoric has been a
part of Donald Trump’s political playbook even before he moved into the White House.
But now the president’s agenda,
which often has focused on
illegal immigration, is looking at those
who’ve already been naturalized
and those who seek to be.
In a yet to be formally announced but expected proposal,
the Trump administration wants to make it more difficult for legal immigrants
– aka those who did it the “right way” – to become citizens. People like this:
I wanted to become a citizen because there’s more opportunities here than there is in El Salvador.
I am excited to be an American citizen so I can go and explore around the world.
Trump’s plan, which is the brainchild of senior advisor Stephen Miller, wouldn’t need congressional approval
And it would make it harder for legal immigrants to gain citizenship if they
– or anyone in their household – had ever used some types of public welfare programs.
We’re talking about things like food stamps, Obamacare and even children’s health insurance.
This is in addition to that June 2018 announcement by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, where it
said it would double down on efforts to find fraudulent naturalization and revoke it.
Philip Smith has been an immigration lawyer for 20 years, and he’s seen a large
increase in the number of immigration applications coming across his desk.
It's busy.
I'm getting questions from naturalized citizens. “Is this going to affect me?
Are they going to try to take away my citizenship?"
There's more of a confrontational nature to the immigration applications.
Smith says there are ebbs and flows in immigration enforcement, but this current climate is a distinct one.
If you have an office, a government office whose job it is to take away people's
citizenship, then it's only natural to expect that they're going to be looking to take away people's citizenship.
I don't think we can ever be sure the government or any government official is acting in good faith.
Now, before you begin skewering or praising Trump and his administration for their immigration policy, know this.
It's Obama's administration that began
operation Janus, a program that existed
to ID people who may have committed
immigration fraud. So the same man that
said ... "We don't simply welcome new arrivals, we are born of immigrants.
That is who we are."
… is the same person responsible for an uptick in denaturalizations,
according to Alaska-based immigration lawyer Margaret Stock.
The Obama administration took a lot of interest in them, and they were doing a lot more denaturalizations
than the prior administrations had done. Under the Trump administration, the
process for applying for immigration benefits has become more technical, more legalistic,
more adversarial, and people are more likely to have to resort to court action
in order to get their immigration benefits.
So it’s not just felonies that can trap you in the intricate maze that is the nation’s immigration system.
It has become increasingly technical and difficult to apply for citizenship. The forms used to be user- friendly.
The forms used to be forms that the average person could understand. And that's not the case today.
It has questions that most lawyers don't understand.
Take a look at this naturalization form. It has 18 parts and dozens of questions.
Things like: “Were your parents married before your 18th birthday?”
and the total number of children you have, including those who are missing or deceased.
Then there’s this one: “Have you ever committed, assisted in committing
or attempted to commit a crime for which you were not arrested?”
hat covers your whole entire life. So you could presumably be
denaturalized some day if you answered that question “no.”
What they're trying to do is give themselves an excuse for taking away your citizenship decades later.
Critics worry a question like that can be true for all of us, for nearly anything, like speeding.
They say everyone would have to answer “yes” to that question,
which would affect their chances of acquiring citizenship.
In a very important Supreme Court decision you may have missed last year, the government argued it
has the right to revoke citizenship even for a seemingly inconsequential lie.
The Obama administration took a denaturalization case all the way to the high court.
The ruling came down in June 2017, which is months after Obama left office.
The case basically teetered on one of the questions on that form we showed you earlier.
Did a woman knowingly give false or misleading information while applying for any immigration benefit?
Here’s the tale.
The government tried to revoke the citizenship of a Bosnian
woman who lied on her naturalization application.
Diana Maslenjak said that when her family fled sectarian violence in the 1990s,
her husband had stayed in Serbia to avoid serving in the Bosnian Serb army.
U.S. officials later learned that wasn’t true. Not only did the husband join his
family when they returned to Bosnia, but
he also served in the army. That detail was enough for immigration officials to seek to
seek to strip his wife's citizenship.
The Supreme Court was quite stunned and startled that any misrepresentation would
lead to you losing your citizenship.
The court said they shouldn't be taking away people's citizenship for some
immaterial falsehood that was on the application.
The outcome of that case is very important, because it has helped set the table
for what’s happening now with the Trump administration.
Stock says Trump’s team is using the Obama administration’s rationale to help push its agenda ahead.
And the thing about denaturalization proceedings is that, unlike in a criminal case, you’re not entitled
to a lawyer if you’re unable to afford one. There’s also no statute of limitations.
All these rules and this tension surrounding denaturalization of immigrants is so old.
Let me show you. Mike, hit them with a tempo change.
When Theodore Roosevelt signed the Naturalization Act of 1906 into law,
it created a mechanism for denaturalizing citizens. It also federalized the naturalization
process for the very first time.
The act was a revised version of an earlier law that required immigrants to learn
English in order to become naturalized citizens.
Programming note: Unlike some other nations, the United States doesn’t actually have an official language.
The law said you could lose your citizenship if you lacked “good moral character,” --
that's a quote -- committed fraud, or if you were racially ineligible.
Subsequent laws expanded the offenses, and at one point,
women who married non-citizens could lose their citizenship status.
But according to Smith, there’s another, more overlooked immigration law he says is draconian
and has become a political tool against people who the government didn’t see as loyal.
We're dealing with the outcome of 1996 and that law to this day.
And that was not something that Donald Trump did. That was something that Bill Clinton did.
In terms of limiting immigration law, it's used every single day, thousands of times.
President Bill Clinton signed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act
in the aftermath of the deadly Oklahoma City bombing.
It broadens the grounds for deporting immigrants. It also became the first law to approve fast-track deportations
– something that’s now widely used.
After 9/11, where the government became more aggressive and began looking at the denaturalization
process as a potential counterterrorism tool, we've slowly seen an expansion of those cases.
He says the result is the creation of two different classes of citizenship,
because the law protects natural-born citizens in a way it doesn’t for naturalized citizens.
It sends a chilling message to naturalized citizens that they are, in fact, not equal
If they were to engage in what is otherwise constitutionally protected activities such as
freedom of speech and religion, if the government were to interpret their activities as disloyal or threatening,
then a government official could attempt to take away their citizenship.
Both Smith and Stock say they have to be very thorough when going through clients’ histories.
So while the Statue of Liberty may say, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled
masses yearning to breathe free,” what it doesn’t say is whether you’ll be able to retain your citizenship,
or that it'll be equal if you do.
All of this emphasis could bring scrutiny to someone like Melania Trump,
whose immigration history is a little murky.
If Melania Trump, we're not the first lady, she would be the kind of immigrant who would be
worried about the current denaturalization proceeding.
It appears she may not have been fully truthful with the government on past visa applications,
possibly on her green card application. And if she had some misrepresentation in the past
and it wasn't disclosed to the government and connection with their naturalization application,
then the government could go ahead now and take away her citizenship.
Both of the lawyers we spoke with say it’s unlikely the government would pursue denaturalization
for something like lying about your weight or something similarly small.
Stock says the government doesn’t even have the resources to go
after all the people it’s seeking. But she’s still already seeing an impact.
Naturalization applications from service members have plummeted.
They dropped 65% after Defense Secretary Jim Mattis directed additional background checks for
non-citizen troops in October 2017. The one thing Smith says you should know
is that if the government is looking to denaturalize you,
it’s up to them to prove their case. They hold the burden of proof, not you.
It should not be easy to take away someone's citizenship, because
if it were, then the individual would always have to be looking over their shoulder.
They could never be comfortable or feel safe and secure and a complete and full member of our society.
So it should be a difficult process.